Nezralix

Nobody is saying that browsing the Internet for WoW tips is cheating. They're bringing up a point that a lot of gamers prefer to work within the confines of the game to improve themselves. They like to go where the game leads them, and figure it out for themselves, so to speak. And given that a lot of single player games often do involve rather trivial puzzles that are easily solved with a bit of outside information, it's no big surprise; players are conditioned to try to figure it out without going to outside sources for help. I think this is just one phrase that people in this thread are blowing way out of proportion.

It's also shocking to me how many people have an argument that essentially boils down to "I don't care about people who aren't reading forums to optimize their gameplay", and so staunchly defending the fact that the game does, essentially, *nothing* to teach you how to play. There are a few rogue quests to teach you how to pickpocket (which are pretty good quests), and there's a very good level 60 hunter quest that requires hunters to move and shoot, and otherwise there's just nothing. It should be blatantly obvious to anyone that this is a gaping failure of player instruction, even if many people have overcome it. And the extreme commonality of level 70 players who don't know what's going on is testament to this. The tired "but people are lazy and stupid (and I hate them!)" standby line that gets trumpeted so much here (and on the general forums) does not account for the overwhelming numbers of people who just aren't doing what you want them to be doing in your average pickup group.

And if anything, players are picking up very bad habits from the supposed "learning instances" in the early parts of the game, where no semblance of coordination is actually needed to be successful. Why do DPS classes think it's okay to not care about crowd control, or to attack whatever they feel like attacking? Well, because they could get away with it. Why do a lot of players of tanking classes get into instances and think it should only be their job to tank one or two things at a time, or to only tank things that aren't the kill target? Because at one point, they could get away with it. And the expectations aren't laid out clearly at all.

Blizzard has more than a few options they could use to help with this. Obviously, tutorial quests for major abilities, when you first acquire them, are great. Or at least some basic information about non-obvious aspects about them, whispered to you by a trainer (or delivered in a more interesting way, whatever). Elaborate quests really aren't necessary.

One mechanic that Blizzard could employ is letting the player control a NPC with a very limited skill set, in situations that encourage the strategy they're looking to teach. For example, a "tank NPC" could have Shield Slam, Shield Bash, and Thunder Clap, and could be tasked with holding the attention of four monsters while a healer NPC heals him, and three other damage NPC's start killing the targets in a predefined order 10 seconds into the encounter. A "warlock NPC" could be tasked with fearing one monster, while applying a number of DoTs that do extra damage to a number of other NPC's, and draining life through some kind of AoE attack. A "healer NPC" could have a high-power heal-over time spell for use in dealing with AoE damage, and so on. So Blizzard could set up controlled scenarios with fairly easy execution requirements, that still basically require the player to do things that they want to teach them to do. Not unlike the Shartuul event, but of course, easier. Quest experience, or 150% of normal experience, would be a fine encouragement.

Blizzard has plenty of options, and none of them are overly demanding on developer time. The idea that tutorial content would somehow impact development of raid content is absurd.

 

Munorion

There actually is something like the "tutorial" that Nezralix just described in the game already - the Shartuul event. It has you control different NPCs with different abilities, and in order to advance one stage, you have to master the previous one. So, from the point of view of the game design, something like this should be very easy to implement for basic class tutorials, shouldn't it?
You'd have to do it instanced, of course.

 

◊ Shalas

General gameplay tutorials would be great. Instead of class quests being "go buff this guy then cast renew on him", there should be something like the hunter/priest quests somewhere around level 50 which give some ridiculously overpowered item that you'll use until you start raiding, and balanced to be so easy that it's impossible to fail as long as you understand the basic concept of what you're supposed to do. Add one of these for everything a class might have to do other than normal solo dps, and hopefully you'd at least stop people from hitting the level cap without ever seeing the point of defensive stance.

Tutorials that actually explain the mechanics of how to play a class would terrify me, though. Even if they somehow managed to make them accurate and comprehensive enough that you wouldn't need external resources anyway (and I don't see that happening), keeping them up to date would be a nightmare. Unless they finally got around to hiring a few mathemetians to build and maintain a model of the entire game (and really, I have no idea why they haven't already done so -- it'd be pretty much the most effective way to fix balance issues), any time changes happened they'd be pretty much reliant on us to update our models, resulting in at least one minor patch worth of time where the guides are wrong.

 

Nezralix

They're never going to have complex treatises on optimal damage rotations in the game; that stuff they *do* expect players to figure out. If some skills are non-obvious, they can hint at how to use them (like Steady Shot weaving). They can also cover basic topics like how to kite, keeping up crowd control while doing damage, efficient healing, multi-mob tanking, etc. All of these are topics that players aren't given any help on by the game. It's just about establishing minimal baseline expectations, because virtually all the 1-70 leveling content is trivial or easily brute-forced.

 

Tucker

Wouldn't the theorycraft folk like to have a "clean room" to test stuff in? People use Dr. Boom now only because of a buggy area to test dps etc. What's so wrong with having a training room for each of the classes where people could concentrate on using abilities without having to worry about "staying out of the fire" etc.? I've been reading these forums for a couple of months now and they have helped a great deal (the ones I could understand at least!) and I'm always excited to get in the game to try various tips but I'm often set back because of a lack of places to "try stuff". Most people wouldn't take kindly to going into an instance and having one of the players announce in the party chat: "Hey, I'd like to practice a new shot rotation/spell rotation/tanking method today, so I might suck at first".

 

Nezralix

I think everyone on this board agrees that it's a good idea, but there are some issues involved. Namely, how much armor do they have? What level are they? Can they dodge/parry? What if multiple people are using them, does it screw up your damage meter results?

But that's all kind of minor stuff. They should still include something like that so people don't have to go out to Blasted Lands.

 

Fenwick

This depends on what you consider the basic, ground level "how to play" mechanics. Do you mean "Skill X does Y"? That's already in there. Or do you mean "This is the best shot rotation for a hunter"? Because that's something players need to figure out on their own. It's kind of funny, the same people that are against using the plethora of information that's already out there on how to play via 3rd party information are the people that want that same information presented in game. How is looking up player-created class information cheating or against the spirit of the game, but incorporating that same (again, created by the players, NOT Blizzard) information in the game with tutorials suddenly okay?

Honestly, when it comes down to it, you don't even need tutorials; there's always someone better than you. If you (general you) group with a fellow rogue Billy one day and see that he does twice the amount of damage that you do, does it not occur to you that you perhaps should ask Billy how he plays? Or are you one of those players who says, "Damn, Billy rocks at playing rogue, but I do just fine despite doing half his DPS, I'm going to carry on as is"? This is what I see as the major problem, the attitude that everything is fine and I don't need help despite seeing someone do it far better than me- not that the game didn't teach me how to play.

Back in 2005, the average age of the WoW gamer was in their late 20's to early 30's (source). Granted, time has passed, but I doubt we have enough new players to skew the average age of WoW gamers down to 12 years old. What does this mean? It means we're mostly all adults. Honestly, if you're not adult enough at age 25+ to ask for help or instruction when you see someone doing it better than you, you're screwed whether or not a tutorial exists in game. We're well past the age where we should need to be spoon-fed things before even walking out the door in the morning.

 

Addled

I'll assume you're talking about the L60 quest for rohk'delar (not entirely sure I spelled that right, it's the MC leaf drop right?). It's worth pointing out that not all hunters got into MC, and even then, unlucky leaf drops meant that a guild could easily be in mid-BWL before every hunter got his leaf and did the quest. And if you were in BWL, there were plenty of easier to get weapon drops, like the Heartstriker (Broodlord), Dragonbreath Hand Cannon (Ebonroc) and Ashjre'thul, Crossbow of Smiting (Chromaggus).

And even then, the new breed of hunters (draenei and blood elf) will never be able to get the MC leaf because nobody runs MC anymore. I have an alt hunter, he has the Onyxia binding drop, but I cannot find a MC pug or even buy off a guild to run me through MC for the drop. What are the new hunters supposed to do?

Not to mention, I believe Blizzard scrapped the whole idea of class-specific quests in the MC days because it took too much work, or that it made people look too similar.

It's worth pointing out that in beta WoW, there used to be target dummies you could beat on to raise weapon skills, test rotations, etc. But they removed that. Go to Theramore, to the training yard, you'll see that you can target the target dummies, and the target dummies go down to 1 HP as the NPC is beating on it, but you cannot open fire on the dummy yourself.

 

Vernichter

I would be interested in more class-specific content as an opportunity for providing gameplay tutorials. Certainly the Hunter and Priest quests at 60 and the Druid flight-form quests show that the potential is there. However, as Wraithlin has pointed out, the game is filled with teaching mechanics. There are certainly esoteric mechanics in WoW - it is baffling that hunter mechanics got more convoluted in TBC - but honestly, they are relatively few and far between. Blizzard could implement a set of class-specific quest lines at 80 that would direct players on the usage of their new 70-80 skills, but even that would not account for talent-granted skills.

There are options for Shartuul-like introductions to basic mechanics of tanking, healing, kiting, cleansing, etc. The deathknight class will also essentially mandate a range of quests to introduce new abilities. Still, more complicated tutorials seems unlikely given the content that is already available and that as an MMO, Blizzard can certainly defer some teaching to the community at large. It would be fantastic if they would be to improve some of the information on tooltips or add auxiliary tooltips that can be reached from the spell book, but I'm hesitant to ask for more than that. After all, the broad variety of quests and encounters added for WotLK will have teaching elements whether they are deliberate or not.

Ed. Target dummies make a world of sense, and I wish they would add them. For a very minimal amount of developer time they would make it much easier to test DPS mechanics.

 

Nezralix

Let's think of some reasons why a reasonable person might not investigate further.

1) Damage meters don't exist in the game, so they don't really even realize what's going on.
2) They don't run 5-mans with other players of the same class as them very often (pretty much always the case for a tank or healer).
3) They attribute people whining about their performance to just that, whining, because realistically, Internet anonymity inspires people to bitch and moan about just about everything.
4) They attribute better performance to better gear (very common and somewhat understandable).
5) They attribute better performance to a spec they don't want to take.
6) They attribute it to more experience, but don't feel that it's appropriate to ask for help (because they don't want to admit weakness to a stranger, or don't want to bother them)
7) They've looked for information online, but were put off by large, potentially out-of-date tomes of information containing a lot of obscure concepts and acronyms that they're not familiar with.
8) They went to the general forums and were insulted/ridiculed.
9) They have friends who play their class, who give them bad advice.
10) They just assume that they're being careful with threat.

Here's ten reasons off of the top of my head that don't involve being 12 years old.

 

Asheneyes

It's important to differentiate though between the varying levels of commitment players exhibit when it comes to WoW. While it certainly feels justified to ask somebody who wants to engage raid bosses not to only have an understanding of their class and general game mechanics it's difficult to expect the same amount of understanding from the larger player base. We need to keep in mind here that there are quite a lot subscribers out there these days. Also, the game offers a lot of complexity on all kinds of levels. Those who raid have already mastered all the basics like farming, transportation, pvp, battlegrounds, crafting etc etc etc. Not to forget questing and actually levelling a character to 70. I can see how it can be a little overwhelming for many people when they are new to the game.

Even though we're talking about the learning curve concerning raiders it doesn't make too much sense to just look at that part of the player base. Instead, we should observe all players. And it's definitely true that a lot of those players lack a very general understanding of the core mechanics of this game. It's been said before that this is often due to the fact that they can get away with a certain level of ignorance. The question should be why?

I'm not sure how many of you have engaged in the nerve wracking process of doing instances with a PuG lately. It's pretty evident right there that something's going very wrong. One of the problems I see is that it becomes exceedingly rare that people actually run the 'learning' instances with a real group set up. There's always the demand for a higher lvl player who will run them through an instance. Maybe that's lazyness on the low lvl player's part. But not entirely though, it's simply very very difficult to find a real low level group for most instances. I'm sure that many of us here who're in guilds who defeated Illidan are veterans of UBRS and Scholomance. Of course it's easy for us to shake our heads sagely at those players who immediately toss a pyro at a mob while the tank's still coming back from a bathroom break. We learned the hard way how the game works. Other people aren't so lucky anymore.

So yes, indeed, this game needs tutorials for newer players. And since nobody likes tutorials, after all, everybody's way too pro for playing tutorials or reading the manual, don't call them tutorials. Make them daily quests. Make them a holodeck looking instance. Allow players to group and enter the instance together to allow for mentor situations. There're so many ways this could be incorporated into the game in a meaningful and fun way. And it could even be made interesting for the high level player. Create leaderboards and high scores for those who heal the most npcs or tank the most mobs while the npcs heal. Again, many possibilities.

Something needs to be done though and the ball's in Blizzard's court on this one.

 

malthrin

You're getting close the point. The game doesn't offer you any feedback in scenarios like that. If 'you' in that scenario are not running a damage meter, how are you supposed to know that Billy did better than you? Likewise, what's necessary for player training isn't to spell out exactly what ability rotation to use, but just to provide some kind of feedback to the player. Picture a daily quest that's effectively a training dummy scenario - you have to beat up a caster mob while he channels a spell, killing a prisoner every 30 seconds or something. The more prisoners you save, the more gold you get. This gives the player feedback - Timmy the new Rogue can realize "Hey, I saved 3 more prisoners by using Slice and Dice today instead of Eviscerate like yesterday" and he will have learned something.

 

Hypatia

I think one key thing that should be uncontroversial is that the game absolutely should provide hints to the player that theorycraft exists. Even if it's a one-line loading screen hint like "There is a great deal of information on the Internet about how to improve your skills in various roles."

Somebody playing up from 1 to max level will learn things about the class they play, it's true. But it doesn't make it clear exactly how much you can get out of a class by using some fairly simple tricks. Some of us naturally try more things out than others, and learn more about how the mechanics work on our own. Some of us know that there are always, always a lot of people trying to learn the underlying mechanics of any game, and swapping knowledge, and that working together makes it much easier to do the best job you can do.

Somebody who has either of the above traits is probably going to learn to do reasonably well. The person who doesn't think to look on the net will likely be a skilled player but be missing some of the more finely detailed information (like how the combat table works, specific threat values, or unusual combinations of abilities that are much more powerful than alternatives.) More importantly, either of these kinds of people will realize that there's a lot of tweaking to do to optimize your play, and they'll be on the lookout.

Somebody who has neither of the above traits will never get the idea that should even be thinking about how to optimize their character's performance. Until somebody hits them with some more intelligent criticism than "OMG, u suk!", they're unlikely to improve, even if they do have the motivation to improve. They just don't have any idea how to go about it.

A little nudge from the game towards the idea that one can and *should* do the best job possible, and that there's a weatlh of information in the world about how to go about doing that, would go a long long way.


I'll also agree that having "target dummy" type structures in the game would be really really handy, though. Have varieties for all of the standard role mechanics (physical offense and defense, magical offense and defense, healing) so that somebody who know what they want to test has something "official" to swing at. (No having to worry about finding a mob of a certain level you can hit and be hit by over and over again.)

 

Goatharder

Something I noticed while leveling up an alt toon was the way people would look at things. There was a hunter I did an instance with who was constantly meleeing. When I asked why he melee'd, he said that raptor strike did more damage than his ranged attacks. At the time, I dismissed him as a tard, but I realized that he represents most of the WoW population. They WANT to improve, just they feel that it's like speaking a whole different language to really understand their class and how the game works.

My dad started playing WoW a while back (while I was off at uni) and he now has a level 70 warrior. His gear isn't bad for blues, but he doesn't have the time to start doing Kara or even heroics. He wants to understand how to play a warrior well and get good TPS while tanking (he tanks for his e-friends) but there's just so many 'basic' concepts that we understand as an afterthought before we really start getting into theorycrafting. We talk about, for example, the benifits of X trinket versus Y trinket for feral or warrior tanks. He doesn't know what a crushing blow is, much less what it does, how to stop it, and why X trinket is better than Y for stopping them. I can't even talk about the differences in the three tank types beyond incredibly vague explanations. It's very difficult to help him learn how to tank (especially since I'm not a tank myself), but I'm helping him with basic information like how to get uncrushable/uncrittable and basic skill priority lists.

A lot of the people who get into theorycrafting are somewhat 'nerdy' by nature. The kind of people who would find their way to the EJ forums in particular take a certain amount of pride in their performance beyond simply looking at it like a way to blow off steam. There are, however, a lot of people who want to do well, but don't want to have to put in the effort for a myriad amount of reasons. My dad has a lot of RL stuff to take care of, and simply doesn't have the time to learn how to tank and put it to use in raids. There are the stereotypical 12 year olds who don't want to learn it simply because they can't, but a lot of players just don't want to dedicate a lot of time learning the large amount of math/whatnot behind the classes.

This can be seen to an extent in how spreadsheet distribution drastically increased the amount of theorycrafting thrown around. Joe Hunter no longer has to be a math whiz to figure out if 12 less agi, 14 more hit, 11 less crit, and 45 more armor pen is an upgrade or downgrade, he can just plug the gear into Hunter Gear Spreadsheet and get a general idea. All he really has to worry about are the mechanics of his DPS and the mechanics of the fight he's in...which equates to pushing the steady shot macro and staying out of the fire. I am Joe Hunter in this situation, because I pulled my hunter out of storage (I quit playing him pre 2.1) and have started to gear him up...I don't know a lot about hunters beyond how to DPS with them, but the availability of spreadsheets fills in for years of experience and pages of formula. It lets me, who has in interest in theorycrafting, get the benifit of the brainsweat out of the way before really working on understanding it.

I would very much like to see a threat meter in game, as well as damage meters and a few other things...I have doubts about the use of a healing meter, simply because if adding these tools would change people's gameplay significantly, they're most likely not doing more than five man instances. Recount's 'last things that happened before someone died' tool is one of my favorites in raids because it shows exactly what happened (one tidewalker raid the healers were getting yelled at for not healing the tank, then recount showed he got crushed back to back quicker than the spammed heals were coming in). I'd love to see some of the ideas mentioned earlier like the target dummies or low level dailies with performance checks. The lower level instances in particular are tuned for people who don't know what they're doing, are off spec, and poorly geared. I'd like to see a bit more challenge for people who are up to it at lower levels, though tuning those would be an absolute nightmare.

 

Roana

At a very basic level, I'd wish that Blizzard explained fundamental game mechanics at all. Not even tutorials, just how the game works.

Take threat mechanics, for example, which you simply need to understand for instances.

When I started playing, I had no clue that there was such a thing as threat. I had read the manual carefully and in its entirety, and it mentioned a lot of things. Threat was not one of them. I had come from tabletop roleplaying games (Amber DRPG, to be specific) and had never played an online MMORPG before. I assumed that mobs were using a kind of complex AI to decide whom to attack and what with. So, I played the game as I'd play in a tabletop RPG (where a concept such as a tank is essentially unknown).

And, all things considered, things worked rather as I expected. Since the groups I was in weren't leveraging the threat mechanics, mobs roughly attacked the most dangerous targets -- heck, you could even see them switching interest to a DPSer who had landed a particularly nasty crit at times.

That was while playing a rogue (the Feint tooltip still mystified me, since it didn't seem to have anything to do with feinting in RL fencing, but the concept it described made sense on an abstract level). Eventually, however, I got bored of a rogue and started playing a priestess. Again, it seemed natural that I was getting attacked by several mobs when healing -- after all, healing was powerful and dangerous, and it made sense for mobs to attack me when I did it to prevent me from doing it further. I wished I had plate armor like paladins, but it didn't even occur to me that other classes may have means to keep multiple mobs off me. I knew I had a Fade ability, but both from the tooltip and the animation it seemed like a weaker version of a rogue's Stealth to me.

Long story short, eventually (once I hit a level of 30-something), I was finally introduced to how aggro works in WoW (at least the basics). That a tank is supposed to "hold aggro", even on multiple mobs, and that I am not supposed to get beaten up the moment I land a heal. But I learned that from other players, not from Blizzard. And of course I would have finally figured it out myself, even if it had been suboptimal, because I'm not stupid. But it would have been a lot less painful if Blizzard had explained the concept in the first place, or, even better, written how-tos explaining how to manage aggro in a group for all classes. Heck, even knowing about aggro, such how-tos would be worthwhile.

Could I have gone to the forums? Yes, but having checked them out earlier, I was not exactly enthusiastic about asking questions there. They were (and still are) poorly moderated, dominated by a lot of PvP trash-talking and one-upmanship. I was simply put off. Going to them for actual information about the game struck me as counterproductive.

The Blizzard website was (and still is) not much better. It is sluggish, even now on my Macbook Pro with a broadband connection, the information is sporadic, hard-to-find, and often non-informative. Look, say, at the current priest class page, which has a lot of pointless information (such as starting attributes by race), but no essential information about playing a priest in a group. The warrior page actively leads you to believe that taunt abilities are the only way through which a warrior can get aggro (and of course, the concept of threat is not mentioned anywhere).

 

Fenwick

I'll concede that the game doesn't include damage meters, which would definitely be a helpful addition; though as usual, I'm sure anything Bliz designs would be inferior to what the players can design. However, I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that we're talking about entry-level raiders, or those intending to raid, that require the help. That generally means there will be people watching damage meters, checking to see who stands in the fire, comparing Lock A to Lock B, etc. So, at some point early on (perhaps even in heroics pre-raid) just about everyone will have a chance at getting feedback. And if your raid or class leader, even a fellow teammate is telling Bob he has a problem, Bob should probably look into things before signing it off as anonymous whining.

I can see your point on #4. However, I've also seen plenty of examples of the lesser geared thrashing their better-geared counterparts. As for #5 and #6, they are two prime reasons for suckage, and amount to nothing more than childish behaviour. "I know that to get better I need to do X, but I don't want to do X!" Too bad, carry on doing a terrible job. "I'm 28 years old and too shy to ask for help!" Be an adult for crying out loud, please. If someone is not motivated or mature enough to at least give the ball that first push toward rolling, I don't think they deserve to have time and resources spent on them. There are plenty of ways to enjoy this game without having to raid and wipe your group repeatedly because you can't be bothered to find and understand how to play better.

I also think there's a misconception that throwing in something like tutorials will take a person at skill level 2 and suddenly bump them to skill level 50. In reality, it'd more likely bump them from 2 to 10. Probably a good thing, actually. But it won't be teaching them the advanced concepts that the combined efforts of tens of thousands of inventive players come up with. At some point Johnny is going to have to man up and look outside the narrow content of the game to get better. I still don't get why people think that the game should be required to give you all or even most of the (moderate to advanced) information that you need to play, especially in light of the fact that there's tons of information out there. Are you going to try assembling that piece of furniture with your fingernails because it didn't come with a screwdriver, even though you have one in your toolkit? At what point do we step back and realize that people need to figure some things out for themselves (even if that means just figuring out there's guides on the web) rather than have it spoon-fed to them by the game?

A practice ground where you can beat on/heal/CC/whatever a dummy could actually be a cool thing. However, you again rely on the thought that Johnny a) accepts that he needs work and b) is motivated enough to use it. If nothing else though, it'd be cool for those of us that like to practice.

 

Nezralix

I guess I could respond to that post, but what would really be the point? There are plenty of reasons why Blizzard and the game could benefit from the game having more instruction on how to play well in a group, but you'd prefer to assign blame. Fine. I can't argue with that any more than I already have.

 

Fleebenworth

Honestly I can not see one reason except the 'better gear' scenario that really stands up to reason in your list. Sure, DPS meters may not exist outside of BGs, but honestly, people post them constantly even in raids as lowly as PuG Kara. The rest of your potential reasons are just excuses which people use in WoW, and real life, to rationalize why they cannot improve and are happy with mediocrity.

On the need for there to be some sort of set of tutorials to teach people some of the more arcane mechanics of the game, I think you need to ask yourself whether the people who get into the situations where said situations are actually relevant even intersect with the group of individuals who have no inkling of how things like threat/dps rotations work. One can complete every boss in karazhan and do every heroic without ever even considering what rotation of skills creates the most TPS in a given situation(and if one are considering such a thing, he or she probably is already using a rotation that does reasonably well).

As said by previous posters, WoW is a very intuitive game. Healing spells, well...heal! If you find you're ru